Tag: bureaucracy

“Ma’am, please calm down.”

Leave a comment
After a two month slog through the visa application system, we are very happy to report that we have both been granted the visas we need to return to India! It was a long series of administrative mishaps involving BLS, the company to which the Indian consulate has outsourced its visa services.  Since the only job the Indian consulate has outsourced to this company is to make sure that all the necessary documents are present and stacked in the right order before they get submitted, it was confusing to repeatedly have our applications—which the BLS staff had checked over and approved—instantly rejected as incomplete at the consulate.

The lack of organization at the office was so extreme as to have been laughable, if so much of our lives didn’t depend on it. Their website required us to make an appointment beforehand, but on arriving at the office, everyone is given a number and waits for their turn regardless of previous appointment. We should have known it was a bad omen when we walked in the very first day and overheard a woman dressing down the manager for his office’s “sheer incompetence.” We had heard the horror stories about people receiving stranger’s passports in the mail instead of their own, or passports being lost altogether, but we hoped that we would be spare that kind of misfortune (my passport did end up lost at one point, but fortunately only for a few hours; it was found in the truck that ferried passports back and forth between BLS and the consulate).

What was laughable, even in the moment, was the bulletin board in the office which proudly displayed “appreciations”, letters of apparent praise written by those lucky customers who eventually had made it through the gauntlet. One letter, dated from a few months before, declared that the customer could see the company was in a sort of “panic”, but that he was confident that with more time and hard work, “you will become the kind of company you wish to be.” Another letter offered more back-handed praise to the company as a whole while marveling over the wonder of having found a single employee who was helpful: “Dear Mr. A., I would like to thank you first in trying to help me… In fact you came as a ray of hope for me otherwise I was lost between Travisa, BLS and Consulate General.  It is very hard to reach [the office], then getting somebody helpful like you is just a miracle.”

Comradery builds quickly among visa applicants in the office. One day several of us overheard a staff member asking someone to contact them if they had any further questions. “But how can I,” the woman countered, “when none of the numbers work, and you never answer your email?” “Yeah,” I chimed in, “None of those phone numbers are real.” “One of them is a fax machine!” another person shouted from the second row of chairs. Another day, a fellow applicant called me over and told me in conspiratorial tones that the excuse the staff had just made to me about the most recent problem with my visa was a lie; she knew it because she was here the day it happened. We all shared stories and bonded over recounting the absurdities of the application process. Everyone was in the same situation: no information on their visas, after weeks of waiting and multiple visits to the office.

In that environment, it wasn’t hard for my husband to lead a sort of quiet revolt on Christmas Eve, and have security called on him. When he found himself trying yet again to wrangle information out of an unhelpful staff, he insisted on waiting next to the manager’s desk instead of waiting “five more minutes”, again, after two hours of waiting, and his act of calm defiance inspired others to join him. They, too, had waited a long time with no effect.  Fortunately, by that time he had already made enough visits to the building to have befriended the amicable African immigrant who stood guard outside, so the whole matter came to an anticlimactic end after the security guard made his entrance, grinning, and politely invited him to take a seat.

One of the last times we visited the office, the woman at the information desk asked casually, “Did you ever make it to India?” I stared at her blankly, incredulous.  I suppose two months would have been enough time to do that, if we were so inclined to subject ourselves to this twice in as many months.  But did she not recall seeing us continuously during that time? A few minutes later one the staff said brightly, “Wow, you guys have spent so much time here it’s like you’ve become our family!” He said this without irony. I think I managed a weak smile.

Now, visas and tickets in hand, we’re thankful and relieved to be putting this season of waiting behind us and get back to the life we left behind in India. Uncertainty abounds there, too, but it takes on a different shade in the light of concrete hopes and plans.

Taking to the streets

Leave a comment
          As we pulled up in the autorickshaw to the crowd of women waiting on the sidewalk, the clouds looked heavy with rain. I had come to this hastily-arranged rally with an Indian acquaintance of mine who organizes women’s groups in slums around the city, educating them about the resources available to them when they face violence in their homes and communities, and training them to work together to advocate for their rights and to support each other in making their communities an environment where women are respected, and where they are safe. She’s confident, well-spoken, and an abuse survivor herself—all of which makes her extremely good at what she does.

As the rain began to drizzle and then pour down on us, I looked around the crowd: some women in saris, others in salwar kameez suits, and a lot of women in full burqa—faces covered, but voices raised. Their courage was expressed in their presence at the rally in the pouring rain, some of them with babies and small children in tow. Their demands were written on the placards and banners they were going to carry through the flooded streets of downtown, all the way to the front gates of the parliament building. The rally was a protest against a slew of recent cases of violent rape across our city and our state in recent months, and the way that government and police alike were complicit in the terror by not only refusing to enforce laws to hold perpetrators responsible, but refusing to investigate cases and even refusing to file police reports when victims or their families turned up at police stations to seek help in the aftermath of these violent crimes.

In the height of the monsoon deluge, the group of protestors—mostly women and girls, but a handful of men and boys, too—stepped off the curb into the water and began their march. Our clothes were soaked, but everyone marched enthusiastically forward, lifting their arms and shouting together. As we neared our destination, a clutch of news photographers and cameramen appeared to snap photos and shoot footage of the event. Not far beyond them, however, the police also appeared in front of the crowd of protestors. I could see one officer alternately shouting something to the women at the front of the column, and then speaking into his walkie-talkie when those women defiantly shouted their slogans and continued moving forward. We soon saw what he must have been radioing about. Ahead of us, a larger group of police was barricading off the entire road. They were pushing the last section of metal fencing into place when the protesters reached them, grabbed the fence, and shoved it backward into the officers. Everyone poured in through the hole, and more of the barricade was knocked aside as we all made our way through. The police scrambled ahead to make their last-ditch attempt at keeping the women from reaching the parliament building. When we arrived, there was already a line of policemen blocking the gates, but that didn’t discourage the protestors from marching right up to them. Someone passed forward a microphone and a speaker which was held aloft as one woman announced why we were here and described the terrible situation of women in our society who can’t count on the protection of either their government or their police force.

A delegation of eight was allowed inside the building to present their demands (including a proposed amendment) to the chief minister; meanwhile, the rest of us waited outside. Police reinforcements had arrived and begun to surround the group. Then the army also arrived, and soon our group was surrounded on all sides by mustachioed men with bamboo sticks and guns. There were roughly a hundred protestors and a hundred police and army personnel, but this didn’t discourage many of the women from turning toward the men in uniform to talk about specific unresolved rape and murder cases over the microphone or to register their anger over police corruption and inaction.

I was impressed by the courage these women displayed, and by their solidarity with one another. The police and the army had been called up to intimidate them, to stop them… and yet here they were, facing off with power and holding their ground. Only time will tell what is to become of the demands the delegation presented to the government that day, but one thing is sure: that kind of courage and willingness to speak out about the violence against women that is routinely swept under the rug, ignored, or denied as something shameful or insignificant is definitely evidence that the tide is changing, however slowly.

Source: New feed